Ok, so I'm about to hit the order button for my new system which will be: - Intel 2600K- Mobo P8P67 Evo B3- RAM Corsair X3M DDR3 2x4 GB- cooling Corsair Hydro H80 while I keep my WD Velociraptor 300 GB, the Corsair 850W power supply and my Asus ATI Radeon 5870 video card (connected to a Samsung 25,5" running in 1900x1200). My OS is Windows 7 64 bit. Now I started wondering whether I should add a SSD sata 3 drive in the 80-120 GB range. What would be the wisest way to arrange the hard drives then? Some say one should put the OS on one drive and FSX (and FS9) on another. Others put the OS with FSX on the SSD and add-ons for FSX on the other drive. I currently run everything off the Vrap (although I do have several 1 GB and 1,5 GB drives laying around) and don't experience any problems but don't know what the effect would of splitting it up to two different drives. The SSD disc I'm considering would probably be a Corsair Force 3 90 GB. It's not the biggest of discs but it should be enough. While I do plan of having both FS9 and FSX installed, I won't have anything else except perhaps Civ5 and the OS. Would it even be better to get a big SSD disc and run everything off it? I know there has been quite a lot of discussion over the last few years regarding this and I've been trying to read up, but I'm just not sure if there is a general consensus nowadays!

My OS is on my V-Rap and FS is on my 80GB SSD. 80GB isn't enough for me though so I would say go up a step from 80. That's partly because of the supposed reliability of SSDs. I think they are a lot better than they used to be but there were stories that they were a lot more likely to fail. I'd much ratehr have my FSX installation go corrupt then my entire computer.

Without respect to your wallet, and if I was doing it again today, I would: 1) buy a z68 board and put an Intel SSD311 on for SRT. I would put the OS on a Vrap and FSX on its own Vrap, alternative to the Vrap a 1 or 2TB hard drive. An alternative if I had the money would be: 2) Stick with the B3 board and put an SSD large enough for both my FSX and OS system on it. What I do not like is mixing SSD and HDD in an ideal world. The best is all SSD if you can afford it. Out of the options you have proposed I would buy another Vrap or a 1 or TB HDD and dedicate FSX to it. Personally I would have FS9 and FSX on seperate drives never the same drive, never a partition.

Thanks for your input! Gary, that's another alternative - to use a SSD in a SRT configuration and then a couple of Vraps for the OS and FSX! Makes me even less determined what to do! LOLBut as I think I understood it from some test I read, you get better performance from just using a SSD for the OS instead of a SSD for SRT and then a normalt drive for the OS. Is the SRT functionality aimed just to improve the performance of a spinning disc or would I also get improved performance from a SSD for SRT AND a SSD for the OS? Things were so much easier when your only real options were a 286 or a 386! :D Regarding FS9 and FSX I really haven't noticed any problems with running them off the same drive. My main simulator is FS9 and I have loads of add-ons there while I only have a few ORBX sceneries installed, PMDG NGX and a few more add-ons in FSX. I think now I will get a Corsair 120 GB disk instead and use an extra spinning disk for backing up mirrors of the SSD partition. Also I will stick with the P67 mobo and skip out the SRT and onboard graphics of the Z68 (whenever the computer is on it runs games anyway, so).